This paper estimates the impact of labor demand on the employment and recidivism outcomes of released prisoners. Higher labor demand at release generates higher earnings and lower recidivism. Reduced recidivism persists after controlling for the observed labor market outcomes of the returning cohort, suggesting that labor demand impacts crime through channels beyond the direct formal employment of returning prisoners. Difference-in-Differences based evidence suggests Ban the Box (BTB) policies delaying when employers can ask about criminal records improve labor market outcomes and lower recidivism for misdemeanor defendants. Evidence for felony defendants and returning prisoners is mixed but suggestive of similar patterns.

This paper uses theoretical and empirical methods to understand the most common reason employers report reluctance to hire workers with a criminal record: legal liability generated by the tort of negligent hiring. While the purpose of the tort is ostensibly to protect and make whole those harmed when an employee misbehaves in a foreseeable manner, I find that, in practice, the tort as most commonly structured generates additional criminal behavior and worsens employment outcomes. I first provide a survey of the current doctrine across the states and trace the origins of the tort through the common law. Using a difference-in-difference strategy, I examine state legislation clarifying the negligent hiring standard and reducing the likelihood that an employer will be found liable. I use survey and administrative data from over a dozen states to compare employment and recidivism rates. The states that changed their negligent hiring law increased employment for people with criminal records by 3 to 5 p.p. (up 5 to 9%) and lowered reincarceration for a new criminal offense by 2 p.p. (down 10%).

Any views expressed are those of the authors and not those of the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau's Disclosure Review Board and Disclosure Avoidance Officers have reviewed this information product for unauthorized disclosure of confidential information and have approved the disclosure avoidance practices applied to this release. This research was performed at a Federal Statistical Research Data Center under FSRDC Project Number 2295. (CBDRB-FY22-P2295-R9926)

This paper studies the impact of adult prosecution on recidivism and employment trajectories for first-time felony youth criminal defendants. We use extensive linked Criminal Justice Administrative Record System (CJARS) and socio-economic data from Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit). Using the discrete age of majority rule, and a regression discontinuity design, we find that adult prosecution reduces future criminal charges over 5 years by 0.48 felony cases (20%) while also worsening labor market outcomes: 7.6 fewer employers (19%) and $613 less earnings (21%) per year. We develop a novel econometric framework that combines standard regression discontinuity methods with predictive machine learning models to identify mechanism-specific treatment effects that underpin the overall impact of adult prosecution. We leverage these estimates to consider four policy counterfactuals: (1) raising the age of majority, (2) increasing adult dismissals to match the juvenile disposition rates, (3) eliminating adult incarceration, and (4) expanding juvenile record sealing opportunities to those prosecuted in the adult system. All four scenarios generate positive returns for government budgets. After accounting for increases in recidivism generated by many of these policies and the corresponding victim costs borne by society, we find positive social returns for expanding the reach of juvenile record sealing and increasingly dismissing marginal adult charges, while raising the age of majority breaks even. Eliminating prison for first time adult felony defendants increases net social costs.

Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. The U.S. Census Bureau reviewed this data product for unauthorized disclosure of confidential information and approved the disclosure avoidance practices applied to this release (DMS number: 7512453, DRB approval number: #CBDRB-FY22-291).

We examine enforcement patterns in administering parking tickets for failure to purchase vehicle registration, colloquially known as the sticker fine, across ticketing agencies in Chicago. Leveraging a sharp 2012 sticker fine increase in an event-study framework, we find that Chicago police increased their enforcement of sticker non-compliance across Black relative to non-Black neighborhoods, but find no disparate response in the ticketing behavior of other parking enforcement agents. This significant disparity in ticketing by police officers is not driven by changes in compliance or differences in neighborhood characteristics, but rather differential enforcement. We present suggestive evidence of differences in officer incentives and marginal parking enforcement costs as key mechanisms. An officer-specific decomposition provides evidence that disparate enforcement is not concentrated among a small handful of officers, but is instead a broader departmental phenomenon. We link this disparate enforcement to a widening of the financial instability gap across neighborhoods, including increased rates of ticket non-payment and bankruptcy filings.

The TCJA of 2017 made large changes to the taxation of corporate and pass-through businesses in the U.S. Understanding the effects of these changes is complicated by the difficulty of finding control firms whose taxation was not altered by the Act. We study the effect of the TCJA on small and medium size banks using credit unions—which compete with these banks for deposits and in making loans—as a novel control group. Credit unions were not taxed both before and after the Act. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we find that an important fraction of the incidence of the tax cut goes to depositors. We find little evidence that employees or borrowers from banks receive a share of the tax cut in the form of higher wages or lower interest rates on loans or that banks increase their investment in fixed assets as a result of the Act.

The American Bar Association declared a "well-being crisis" among lawyers, but the empirical basis for this claim has been contested in recent years. This study systematically compares two high-quality, nationally representative surveys-the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH)-to measure the prevalence of mental illness and alcohol misuse among lawyers. In both surveys, lawyers report elevated rates of alcohol misuse compared to the general public and similarly educated peers. The NHIS finds that lawyers experience psychological distress at rates lower than the general public and similar to, or moderately higher than, similarly educated peers. But the NSDUH paints a different picture: over 40% report moderate or serious psychological distress in the past year. A rate significantly higher than those reported by the general public, similarly educated peers, and the rate found in the NHIS. While we are unable to explain fully all of the differences across the two national surveys, we resolve some of these differences by studying sensitivity to instrument validation and calibration and precisely aligning the measurements used in both surveys. To assess the remaining differences, we highlight several advantages of the NSDUH, including the privacy of data-gathering methods, additional clinically validated mental illness measures, and results that are more consistent with other national surveys. The persistent divergent findings from the NHIS and NSDUH underscore specific challenges in measuring mental illness and the importance of continued work on survey implementation, validation, analysis, and interpretation.